


Drawn At A Venture

by Artemis2050



Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - All Fandoms, Thor (2011)
Genre: Archery, F/M, First Meetings, Game Theory, Gen, Meet-Cute, Physics, The Good Doctor - Freeform, iPod Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-13 10:50:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/502722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis2050/pseuds/Artemis2050
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Starts with Darcy Lewis and a few of our favorite characters. Goes on to many things to be discussed later.</p><p>Some things to be discussed:  way too much about archery.  Now!  Also with way too much about game theory!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Nobel Collection

**Author's Note:**

> So. This is a new fandom for me and this is a long story, so I'm thinking posting in parts is a good idea.
> 
> Since it's not all going up at once, tags and other information may get added later so as not to spoil the ongoing tale. And if I put a summary, that would sort of defeat the purpose so....yeah.
> 
> In this, Darcy's poli-sci degree has her leaning more towards the technical end of things. Can we work with that for now?

_Von Neumann. Morgenstern. Bayes. Maynard Smith. Nash. Schelling._

_These are heroes._

Darcy Lewis is not a fucking astrophysicist.

And while all this superhero and save-the-world stuff is interesting and all, she really only signed on to fulfill her science requirement somewhere outside of a biology lab and that was supposed to be one summer internship, _finito_ , done deal, back to the real world. 

She hasn’t been in anything resembling the real world in over a year now.

And sure, she knows they’re doing important work. _They_ being the operative word here. She’s been basically making coffee. And that’s not what she signed on for either, and she’s way long since gotten tired of being surrounded by people who think she’s some kind of airhead because she doesn’t understand their math.

Well, they don’t understand hers either, so fuck that noise.

Being shipped off to somewhere just north of Nowheresville on about three minutes’ notice was not exactly on her agenda either, and maybe the one useful thing she’s done in the past year was to keep Jane Foster from going completely off the rails when she not only realized that her prestigious special assignment had been totally cooked up just to keep her out of the way while this group of weirdo superheroes was trashing Manhattan, but that her own particular semi-god superhero had been among them and then had promptly disappeared again.

The Asshole from Asgard hadn’t even bothered to call.

It still blows her mind that Jane, devastated as she was, had still made excuses for the guy. She’d cried on Darcy’s shoulder, ate a lot of ice cream (never gaining an ounce, maybe astrophysics was the new Pilates), and then thrown herself back into her work, newly determined to solve the mysteries of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. 

Darcy never really got that part of it. The physics part, sure: that had been Jane’s obsession since the day she’d met her. But the part where this was somehow going to solve her romance issues, that didn’t make any sense. If a guy didn’t call, he didn’t call. He just wasn’t that into you.

Jane had apparently never read that kind of self-help book.

And now they’re on their way from Nowheresville to Who Fucking Knows Where, because some self-important dick in an eye patch and a black coat had showed up and told them to get back on a plane, and asking him whether she could maybe just be dropped back off in Atlanta hadn’t worked.

Darcy sighs, and stares at what would be the window of the plane if it weren’t for the fact that all the windows have their shades drawn. Permanently. Like, welded in place.

“What’s the big deal if we figure out where we’re going? We’re on our way _there_ ,” she complains out loud to Erik Selvig, who’s sitting next to her with a S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued eye mask over his face.

“Don’t know,” he replies. Calmly. He’s gotten way into a lot of Zen-type stuff since whatever happened while she and Jane were shanghaied (sorry, _isolated for their own protection_ ) to Norway and she’s still piecing together events from the limited news reports she’s managed to sneak through the firewalls. Even her new iPhone has some kind of NetNanny on it.

“Well, _hell_ ,” she mutters, and slumps further down in her seat. There are things to be said for private planes, good things even, like the seats that are the size of any three economy-class commercial flight versions and the not having to wait in line at airport security, but when it comes down to it, it’s still just a box she can’t get out of, something she’s not in control over.

Darcy is so not a fan of not being in control. She wants out of this plane and out of this eternal summer internship and out of this craziness, and she gets out of her seat and heads toward the back of the plane because if she doesn’t _move_ she’s going to start clawing the walls.

The airplane bathrooms are better than commercial, too, with enough room to move around and an actual human-sized sink. Darcy finds the stash of face and hand wash and takes a few minutes refreshing herself before she snaps the lock of the door back to _Vacant_ and steps back into the galley. The door—no cheesy curtains here, they have actual doors—through to the rear of the plane is open as they seem to be changing guards. Darcy only gets a glimpse, but it’s like a scene out of some action movie, with weaponry and tables with maps on them and about thirty uniformed muscle-bound extras standing or sitting around. Plus Captain Eyepatch, who’s lost the Neo coat and is in shirtsleeves and, omigod, _suspenders_.

Something male and tall and ridiculously ripped slides the door shut and takes up position in front of it. Darcy doesn’t need any encouragement to _Move along, miss_ , so she puts her head down and pretends that she wasn’t looking anyway.

When she gets back to her seat, Jane has taken it over, has half a dozen papers spread out in front of herself and Selvig and is scribbling frantically as she explains something to him. She barely glances up when she throws Darcy a half-smile of apology.

Darcy considers whether to reach over them both to retrieve her iPod from the seat-back pocket and decides it isn’t worth the effort.

She stomps a couple of rows further forward and throws herself into a seat. They’ve been on this plane for nearly a full day and if they don’t land soon, they’re going to be back at the same airport they took off from. 

She’s too annoyed and antsy to find anything to do, so she just kicks off her shoes, tucks her legs up under her and tries to find some of that Zen shit behind her eyelids. She must doze off, because the next thing she knows there’s an announcement being made that they are preparing for arrival. 

Arrival procedures on private planes ought to be simple, too, but for some reason, even after they’re obviously on the ground and the plane has taxied to a stop, it still takes a good twenty minutes for them to open the doors. Since baggage check is not an issue, all Darcy has to do is grab her messenger bag, and then she has to sit and stew some more for those twenty minutes that seem to take longer than the whole damn flight. Then the doors up front open, and she sees sunshine and moves fast enough to be the first one at the door. At which point she wants to turn around and hide under her seat until the plane takes off to go somewhere else.

It’s the Santa Fe Airport. They’re in New Mexico. Again. After a year, she’s back where she started. 

“Fuck,” she mutters under her breath, and when someone’s hand reaches toward her arm to help her onto the rollaway runway stairs she jerks away. This turns out to be not such a good idea, because she almost loses her footing on the metal stairway and the hand ends up grabbing her to keep her from tumbling straight down onto the tarmac.

“Careful,” warns the owner of the hand. “You all right, Miss Lewis?”

Darcy squints up at him, her eyes not yet adjusted to the desert sunlight. “Do I know you?”

“This way.” The man, who in her nearly-blinded state is not much more than a uniform and mirrored sunglasses, walks her forward and down the stairs so the rest of the people behind her can deplane. “We’re briefed on all arrivals,” he continues, and she realizes after a second that he’s obliquely answering her question.

At the bottom of the stairs he lets go of her arm. “Stay here,” he tells her. “There’ll be a car along in a minute.” He doesn’t wait for an answer before heading back up the stairway.

“Asshole,” she mutters. She’s just in a generally pissy mood and ready to take it out on anyone in range, especially anyone military and businesslike and in charge of keeping her somewhere she doesn’t want to be. But she didn’t really mean for him to hear her, so when he breaks stride and half-turns his head she ducks her own, suddenly looking very hard for something in her bag. Sunglasses, she could definitely use sunglasses of her own right now.

Jane joins her a few minutes later, and her obvious delight at their return to her old stomping grounds just worsens Darcy’s attitude. “Everything’s back the way it was,” she says cheerfully as they’re ushered away from the plane and toward an impressive-looking black Hummer limo, which is a combination that had never occurred to Darcy as something that could exist. Not that she really cares if they glued together a couple of Dodge Chargers; she only cares that it’s air-conditioned. Norway is a far cry from summertime in the desert, aside from that whole fucking thing about having no idea where they were going, and she’s so not dressed for this. She already can’t wait to climb into the blessedly cool back seat of the car. “It’ll be just like it was before.”

“Sure,” Darcy says tonelessly. 

“And all our work will be ready to go in the morning. All our equipment came first and Colonel Fury says—”

“I don’t really give a fuck what Colonel Fury says,” Darcy mutters, and great, now she’s got Jane looking at her like she’s a loose cannon too. Jane is nothing if not smart, if a little overly bloody-minded where her pet projects are concerned, but she still gets it.

“I’m sorry, Darcy,” she says a little stiffly. “I know this isn’t where you’d rather be right now.”

“Whatever.” Darcy stares out the window, or _at_ the window really, since it’s tinted dark glass and she can’t really make much out beyond it. She’s going to hang onto this grouch if that’s all they’re going to leave her with.

Before long Erik joins them, sliding into the seat beside Jane, who shifts over to make room. Darcy doesn’t pull her messenger bag into her lap to help out, but this is not a Honda Accord; there’s plenty of room. He and Jane begin talking quietly about what experiment to set up first. Darcy sighs and flips open her messenger bag, digging around for a second before she remembers.

She’s out of the car in a split second, but the stairway to the plane has already been rolled away and the door is closed, and even as she watches the plane starts to move, the engines beginning to rumble. “Shit!” She waves at the plane uselessly, feeling ridiculous, and stamps her foot. “You goddamn motherfucking _assholes_!”

Someone grabs her arm again and she spins around, dropping her bag to the ground and ready to deck whoever it is, and it’s her escort from before. He’s standing there with no expression she can see behind those sunglasses that reflect into her eyes enough to make her squint again, and she jerks away from him and squats down to stuff her spilled belongings back into her bag. He kneels down to help and she grabs a lip gloss out of his hand. “Just leave it.” She has to rub her hand under her nose because she is not crying, she does _not_ cry, especially in front of S.H.I.E.L.D. assholes, but her eyes are watering from the sun and it’s making her nose run.

He stands back up and lets her finish gathering up her stuff by herself. When she finally stands up, she’s sort of back under control. Then he holds something out to her. “Is this yours?” Her iPod is there in his hand. “Someone found it on the plane,” he adds neutrally.

She takes it, too filled with a mixture of embarrassment and leftover rage even to say thank you, and shoves it into her bag on top of everything else. She turns back toward the waiting limo without being told, and she only realizes he’s followed her when their hands collide reaching for the handle of the door.

“I got it,” she snaps, and he jerks his hand away. He doesn’t say a word, just lets her open the door herself and slip back in next to Jane. Then he closes the door after her with a solid _thunk_.

Darcy is more than a little horrified when she realizes he’s getting into the front seat beside the driver. The car rolls smoothly away on the thirty-minute drive that will land her back in Puente Antiguo and the next chapter of her own personal Groundhog Day.

“Everything all right?” Jane asks, but it’s just a polite nothing; she really barely noticed what was going on at all. She’s got her notebook out and her papers, and Erik has his laptop open already.

“Yeah. Just trying to make sure these assholes didn’t steal _two_ iPods,” she answers. Jane pays no attention whatsoever, but just then she sees Escort Guy turn his head and not quite look back at her, which is when she realizes the barrier between the back seat and the driver is wide open.

Darcy pretends she doesn’t notice a thing, not a goddamn thing, and just leans her head against the smoked-glass window and closes her eyes.

It’s going to be a long fucking summer.


	2. Zero-Sum Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy settles in and starts trying to figure out a few things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Game theory is the study of strategic decision-making; it might also be described as a system of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent, rational decision makers. Since its inception in the field of economics, increasingly complex models have been developed to allow its application to sociology, political science, philosophy and even biology. In philosophy, theoretical games arguments can be found as far back as Plato._
> 
>  
> 
> _In short, if there is a behavior, a choice to be made and a player or players of the game, a theory can be developed to explain it. It is considered that modern game theory began with John von Neumann’s proof of the existence of mixed-game equilibria in two-person zero-sum games._

It totally does not get any better from there. Yeah, the town of Puente Antiguo is just like it was before the Big Scary Fire-Breathing Robot From Outer Space came by. But the sameness is just as weird as the original event.

Darcy saw the town in flames; saw all the damage to the buildings and the broken glass and all of it. She helped get people into trucks and cars to get _away_ from all of it. The thing is, what’s there now isn’t like what normally happens when you rebuild after a disaster. There should be improvements, things that look shiny and new. This is like time’s been rewound.

When the limo pulls up in front of their old building, and Darcy gets out to look around, what she thinks of most is a trip she took once to an Old West tourist trap. There’s the same feeling of being on a movie set instead of a real place. Even though she can see the cakes in the display case of the diner across the street, and the glass of the shop windows is all intact again, this just isn’t real. No one is going to borrow books from the library, or play games at the video arcade, or order lunch at the diner counter.

Mostly because the only people here, apart from herself and Jane and Erik, all work for what is now officially her least favorite government agency since the IRS, or maybe the McCarthy-era Subcommittee on Investigations. They aren’t all in black suits, but they might as well be. They all have that too-neat, too-pressed look and, as one of them starts to unload Darcy and Jane’s luggage from the back of the limo, she notices that even the ones in polo shirts and khakis have guns.

Darcy shivers, in spite of the heat, and takes a few steps away from the car. She really does not like guns. 

She wanders a little way down the street, peering around at all the everything-new-is-old-again reconstruction, until someone calls after her.

“Miss Lewis?”

She turns, expecting Mr. Escort, but instead it’s a dweeby-looking guy in a suit that she thinks looks familiar for a second. But as he gets closer, she figures it’s just all these guys looking the same after a while: dark suit, earpiece, insignificant-looking, holding a file folder he probably stole from somebody else.

Dweeb gives her a regulation smile as she stops in front of him. “We’d prefer to introduce you back to the town in a more…supervised fashion.”

Darcy pushes her glasses up her nose to get a better look at him and still isn’t particularly impressed. “Yeah? Who’s going to supervise me?” She glances back at the car. “Him?”

Dweeb looks back as well and seems taken aback. “Ah…he’s not…”

“Not what? Not unimportant enough to waste his time on supervising me? Fine. I’ll supervise myself.” She turns on her heel and starts back the way she was headed in the first place, and then suddenly there are Bigger-Than-Dweeb Guys in front of her. A lot of them. She stops short and looks around.

An arm goes around her waist and turns her firmly back toward the car and the reconstituted façade of Jane’s headquarters. “Just walk,” a voice says in her ear, and for some reason she does, not stopping and not looking up until they’re safely inside the former car dealership that she knows so well.

Darcy halts when she feels the arm drop away, and turns around, but her own personal S.H.I.E.L.D. babysitter once again isn’t waiting for any questions; he’s already halfway to the door. She does notice two new things about him this time: first, he’s got a gun too, which is not a point in his favor. Second, he has a really nice ass. Which sort of is.

“Hey!” she calls after him, and he pauses on his way to wherever S.H.I.E.L.D. babysitters go when their charges are safely stashed. “Someone going to tell me what the actual rules are here, or are you just gonna shoot me if I color outside the lines?”

He turns, and the mirrored shades don’t let her get much of an idea of whether he’s amused or annoyed at this point, but for some reason her knees are feeling a little shaky. Slowly, he comes back, and by the time he reaches her she decides the answer is definitely _annoyed_.

But what he says, when he reaches her, is not what she expects, and neither is the low, controlled tone he uses. “First, you can’t talk like that.” It’s not threatening, and it’s not making her angrier, which is what she would have thought. “This is a secured area now, and someone might actually do that. Second, I get that you don’t want to be here, but the reason you’re here is because it really isn’t safe for you to be anywhere unsecured right now. Yeah, I know that sounds like circular logic.” He places a casual hand on her arm and walks a few steps further into the room with her, and away from all those other, bigger, also-armed guys. “If there’s something you want, we’ll try to get it for you, but I’d appreciate it if we could all try to get along here.”

Darcy doesn’t like feeling about twelve years old, but she knows she’s been acting like a brat and probably deserves it. She also wishes the guy weren’t still wearing those sunglasses. It might help her get a bead on what’s going on here and how she’s supposed to fit into all of it, if she could only see his eyes. 

“Who are you?” She hopes it doesn’t sound petulant; that’s not what she means and it isn’t a challenge. But there’s an almost imperceptible pause before he answers, as though he’s weighing the simple question and what response he’s going to give.

“Name’s Barton,” he finally answers briefly. “In charge of security.”

Which explains the aura of authority and the automatic deference of the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, she supposes, both of which she notices over the next few days. She certainly has the chance, since there are always several agents within sight and he’s often among them.

She just tries to keep busy and off radar, which she has decided for now is the better part of valor. At the moment, anyway, there are things to do, like moving into their new rooms (nicer than the trailers they’d had before; there was a bed and breakfast in town and the restored version is now all theirs, hers and Jane’s and Erik’s) and setting up the workshop with equipment. The agents are helpful with heavy lifting, if intimidating. It gets easier to ignore them as time goes on, too; they’re good at staying in the background.

Once the basic housekeeping is done, she notices that they’re allowed to move around more freely, at least within the Main Street area of town. It’s still creepy and more than a little Twilight Zone to have everything run by agents, but it turns out that the diner is the ad hoc cafeteria and supplies are available through the grocery and the hardware store and the arcade’s doors are always open. The library never closes and there’s no due date on any of the books. There’s limited access on the computers, though.

She spends a lot of time there, to the point where one big study table in the back is always covered with her notebooks and texts. No one’s going to need the space, and if anyone ever looks at what she’s doing, they’re careful not to leave anything out of place. The librarian, who is either Dweeb from the first day in town or his twin brother, is happy to requisition books she needs from outside libraries; everything she asks for appears within a day or two on her table. 

Jane and Erik are in a world of their own these days, and their requests are being similarly magically supplied, which doesn’t leave much for Darcy to do. She sometimes sits and watches as they fill chalkboards with equations, doodling her own in a notebook, but eventually she always winds up at her table at the library, trying to figure out what to do next. 

Days blur into each other, and she starts to slip into her old college night-owl habits, sometimes working so late she’s alone on the street when she walks back to her room. At least, to all appearances she is.

One night she’s on her way home, a couple of equations and Greek letters still bouncing around in her head, and she sees a light on in the workshop, so she veers off to see what’s going on. Nothing, as it turns out; someone must have just left one on in the kitchen. But since she’s there, a cup of hot chocolate doesn’t sound like a bad idea, and she’s not tired, so she fills a thermos and grabs a mug, her notebook and a flashlight off Jane’s workbench before taking it all up to the roof.

She hasn’t been up here since they left the first time, and it’s nice that their little relaxation area is still there. She sets the thermos down on the little table and settles herself on one of the chairs.

She doesn’t turn on the flashlight right away; she can see plenty well by moonlight to pour her hot chocolate and it’s nice to just lie back and watch the stars for a while, let her work shuffle around in her head if it wants to and not worry about writing it down. She isn’t sure what suddenly makes the hair on her neck stand up and her breath catch in her throat. She should be used to being watched covertly by now.

Darcy has the flashlight in her lap and she closes her fingers around it very, very slowly. She even forces herself to take another sip of her cocoa before she sets it back down on the table, which covers the movement as she rotates the flashlight over and up. She takes a deep breath and holds it for a second.

When she flicks the switch, she has just enough time to recognize the figure at the top of the old neon sign before it simply plummets out of sight, and her breath comes out in a whoosh as she jumps to her feet, swinging the flashlight wildly, certain that she’s caused someone to have a fatal accident, all because she was trying to be cute and show she could do a little covert activity of her own—

The flashlight is jerked out of her hand and switched off before she can draw another breath. Darcy stumbles back and lands heavily on her chair. She thinks she probably would have screamed if she’d had time, and wonders if it would make sense to do that now.

She doesn’t, though. After a second or two, her eyes have readjusted and her brain has cleared enough to focus on the man in front of her. She blinks a couple of times for good measure, and yeah, it’s still him, what’s-his-name from arrival day. “Are you all right?” she demands.

Whatever _he_ was expecting clearly wasn’t that. He shakes his head just once in disbelief. “What did you think you were doing?” he shoots back. “What part of being in a secured environment do you not get?”

Darcy gets back to her feet, because she’s damned if she’s going to sit there and be scolded. “What part of it? Maybe, like, _all_ of it?” She takes a step toward him and tries to grab her flashlight back, but he’s faster than she is and pulls it out of her reach. “What part of letting people know you’re there do _you_ not get?”

“The part where that’s actually my job,” he retorts. “And the part you don’t get is going to get you in serious trouble if you keep pulling stuff like this.”

“Yeah, right,” she says jeeringly. “Because you guys are all _so_ good at your jobs you can’t tell the difference between me and an actual security risk.”

“The question is not whether we can tell, Darcy, it’s whether someone has time to decide before pulling the trigger.” 

She figures he’s trying to rein this in, trying to use that same calm, reasoned tone that he used with her before, but this time, what with her massive adrenaline rush and all, it doesn’t work. “If you shoot as well as you hide in the dark, I guess I don’t have much to worry about.”

He has absolutely no visible reaction to that, if going more completely still than Darcy would have thought a human being ever could doesn’t count as a reaction. But in that same few seconds, somehow, any desire she might have had to continue this conversation has entirely vanished. 

She flinches when his hand comes towards her, but he’s only holding out the flashlight for her to take. She does, trying to think of something she can say to mitigate the absolutely fucked-up mess she’s made of this night, but when her fingers close around the metal shaft of the flashlight, he doesn’t let go.

“If I shoot at you,” he says evenly, “I won’t miss.”

She believes him, completely. She doesn’t have time to say anything else, though, or even to draw another breath before he’s moving, brushing past her. She only has time to think that he’s heading the wrong way, the stairs are behind them, before he’s vanished.

The only direction he can have gone is over the edge of the roof, and okay, they’re only one story up, but she runs over anyway and gets the flashlight on, plays it over the ground below and then up and down the street.

It’s completely deserted.

Darcy doesn’t know why her reaction is to laugh, but she does, out loud, and then almost drops the flashlight over the side of the building when she automatically claps a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound.

That was just so totally cool.


	3. Theory of Utility

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participant(s). Resources are finite and the combination of all strategies, regardless of choice, must sum to zero._
> 
> _Most classic board games, including chess, are zero-sum games. Early applications of the zero-sum games theory to economics were continued by Oskar Morgenstern in his works after the development of the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem._

Darcy’s late the next morning, of course, not that anyone is going to notice. She doesn’t even make the freaking coffee any more; just like everything else that needs to be done, there’s always a freshly-brewed pot made and she doesn’t even see who makes it. She pours herself a mug and, after a minute’s thought, wanders up to the roof. She just doesn’t feel like sitting around the lab again all morning and it’s been days since Jane really had anything for her to do, that’s all.

Annoyingly, there are two agent-types up there already, she guesses to do surveillance, although what exactly there is to survey in a town that’s now basically a movie prop she still isn’t sure. They’re watching something, though, and pretty intently, although of course she gets the rapid S.H.I.E.L.D. once-over as she climbs up and sits down on one of the deck chairs. Actually, now that she’s noticing in daylight and all, they’re not the same deck chairs they left here last year; those were old, weather-beaten Sears bargain-basement deck chairs. These are wooden with way cushier seats, which is one change Darcy wholly approves of. She sips her coffee and tries to pretend the two agents are just so much stage dressing.

They don’t pay her much attention, once they identify her as The Intern; they just go back to watching whatever they were looking at. They speak to each other, quietly at first, but soon they forget she’s there and their voices rise.

“Fucking amazing,” one says.

“Guy’s not human,” agrees the other, and whistles. “See that?”

Darcy ignores them as long as she can, but eventually she stands up to try and see what they’re talking about. But she’s too short, so she has to go closer to the edge of the roof, and even then she can’t really figure out what they’re watching. Then one of the agents hands her his binoculars, and points.

It takes her a second to focus the binoculars, and when she does at first she doesn’t see what the fuss is about. And she might have known, it’s that same guy again, and it looks like he’s taking target practice. The unexpected part is that it’s with a bow and arrow, and she can’t see the target. He’s standing still just now, doing something to his bow; there’s a quiver leaning against his leg. As she watches, several other men come into view, all casually dressed in sweats or shorts and t-shirts. All of them have an armful of arrows.

Darcy watches as the archer sifts through the arrows. Some he selects and reloads into the quiver, others he drops into a pile at his feet. He’s the only one wearing something that looks like a uniform, a dark vest and pants, and she thinks it must be pretty damn hot standing out there in the sun like that.

The other men scatter once they’ve made their deliveries, and after the bowman—she _is_ going to remember his name eventually, this was bothering her all night—finishes whatever he was doing to the equipment, he shoulders the quiver in one quick movement and takes aim. Darcy catches her breath as she watches him draw one arrow after another and fire them off in such quick succession she loses count.

She turns her head, trying to see what he’s shooting at, and there’s nothing there, nothing but desert. It doesn’t make any sense, and then the agent standing closest to her puts his hand on the binoculars and directs her attention further away.

Much further away.

Where a half-dozen arrows are embedded in the center of a target that’s so far in the distance she has to readjust the focus before she can see it. And then she realizes there’s another target beyond that. And beyond that, where she gets her binoculars in focus just in time to see another six arrows land, so close that they almost look like one.

“That’s something, right?” She lets the binoculars drop and looks up at the agent who handed them over, wanting to ask a few questions, but he points back out with some urgency. “Watch this,” he directs her, and she raises the binoculars again.

The archer is facing in the other direction now, raising the bow again, although something is different. It takes her a second to realize that he’s reversed his grip, switched hands—and now he sends arrows flying just as fast, just as easily. With the other hand.

“Can you _do_ that?” Darcy mutters, and the agent standing next to her laughs.

“You can if you’re him,” he answers. Then he does as much of a double-take as she’s ever seen out of anyone involved with S.H.I.E.L.D. “You know who he is, right?”

It comes back to her. “He said his name was Barton.”

The man looks at her like she’s a little dim. “Yeah. Clint Barton. Hawkeye.” He waits for the penny to drop, but she still has no idea what he’s talking about. “One of the Avengers,” he adds, and then suddenly it makes sense.

She whips the binoculars back up, to find that Barton has exhausted his ammunition again and is waiting for more arrows to be returned, or something. She hands the binoculars back to the agent and walks toward the trap door leading back down to the main building with as much nonchalance as she can muster.

Once on the ground, she walks down the street half a block before heading out toward the desert. She’s had a lot of practice in figuring out the best ways to avoid notice, walking through the deserted buildings pretending to be a real town, and no one stops her until she’s already well out into the periphery. Then she starts seeing those guys in sweats closing in on her. She doesn’t bother to try to avoid them. Barton is within sight now, and clearly he can see her coming, so she figures if he doesn’t want to talk to her he can just tell his posse of golden retrievers to get rid of her.

By the time she reaches the center of all those targets, she’s kind of feeling like one herself. No one says anything to her, and no one stops her, but she’s got the bunch of them trailing after her like she might explode.

Barton, or Hawkeye, or whatever his name is, stands there doing something again to the string of his bow. He doesn’t really look at her.

She stops a few feet away. “You didn’t tell me,” she says.

Darcy actually appreciates that he doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what she means. In fact, she’s pretty sure he comes close to cracking the first smile she’s seen out of him. “I thought you’d rather figure it out for yourself.”

“You do this every day?” She peers out towards the targets; they look even farther away than she’d thought they would.

“Nah. Just when someone seems to think I’m out of practice.” 

Darcy crosses her arms and considers that for a minute. “Okay. I’ll take that hit. Once.”

It’s definitely a smile, or at least a smirk. “Might want to rephrase that.” He finishes readjusting the bow and rests it against one leg, putting his hands on his hips. He meets her gaze and Darcy loses the staring contest, but only because the sun’s in her eyes. She raises one hand to shade them. She has just _got_ to find her prescription sunglasses.

“Sorry,” she offers. “You’re right, you wouldn’t have shot me by mistake.”

The smirk widens until it’s pretty close to a grin. “And?”

She sighs. He wants blood. “And you wouldn’t have missed,” she admits.

“Damn straight, Lewis.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Oh. Okay. We’re on a last-name basis now?” He’s enjoying this just a little too much, she decides. “Can you teach me to do that?”

Sure enough, that brings him up short. “What?”

“To shoot. Looks like fun.” She comes a little closer. “Can I see?”

Darcy thinks he’s about to refuse, but after a second he lifts the bow up and holds it out for her to look at. She doesn’t make the mistake of assuming she can touch; this is obviously valuable equipment, and she knows all about how it feels when someone just grabs your stuff.

It doesn’t look like any bow she’s ever seen before. There are too many strings, for one thing, and it’s way more complicated-looking than she would have realized; it’s really a massive-looking thing. She looks at him for permission, and only after he nods, she puts a finger on the framework of the bow itself, traces its curves down to the grip.

“It’s a compound bow,” Barton says, and she looks up. His eyes, now that they’re not hidden behind the glasses, are softer than she’d expected, a kind of grey-green-blue that she’s sure changes with his mood. “Special design.”

_Of course it is._ “Is it hard to use?” She’s really curious; she’s never seen anything like it.

He pulls the bow back a little when she reaches toward the strings. “Sorry,” he says, a little embarrassed. “It’s not good to dry fire…you can mess up the, uh, the system.”

“Oh.” Darcy puts her hands behind her back. “So show me.”

He looks a little taken aback, but he turns away from her, towards the targets in the distance. From such a close perspective, she gets a whole new appreciation of the ease with which he reaches up behind his head, takes an arrow from the quiver on his back, fits it to the string, draws and fires. It’s all one motion, and she can hear the whistle of the arrow and the far-off _thock_ as it pierces the center of the farthest target.

He glances back at her, and then, just like she saw from the roof, sends off five or six more in quick succession. It’s such a technically perfect performance, Darcy thinks, it should seem mechanical, except somehow it isn’t. Every movement has grace and power; it’s kind of mesmerizing.

Barton looks back at her one more time, half-smiling, as if to see her reaction. She’s not going to overdo it, though; he obviously already knows how good he is. Then, without turning his head, he looses one more arrow, just as fast. It flies just as true, and an instant later it’s shuddering in the center of the target with the rest.

Darcy has taken two steps forward before she knows what she’s doing, with a gasp of disbelief. She really has no idea what to say about what she just saw. Barton looks down after a second, like he’s a little embarrassed by the showoff move.

“Let me try. Just once,” Darcy says in a rush. “Please?” She doesn’t even know why she wants to, she’s never even held a bow and arrow in her entire life, but she does. She really wants to have some idea of what it feels like to do that. Even if she’s not going to be any good at it.

He doesn’t turn back to her, just keeps staring down at the bow that’s still in his hand, but a furrow appears on his brow like he’s thinking it over. Then he shakes his head.

Darcy is unreasonably disappointed, given that she didn’t know an hour ago she wanted to do this. Barton waves towards the other agents, gestures towards the targets. They start moving out, apparently to pack up. Then he turns back to her.

“Not with this. You couldn’t handle this,” he tells her, and goes toward a pile of equipment that’s sitting on the ground a few feet away. Darcy watches as he stows the bow into a case that seems to be made for it; he unshoulders his quiver and lays it on top of the box as well.

She comes a little closer as he kneels down to unzip a long duffel bag that’s lying there too. He flips it open, and what’s inside is something she’d actually have recognized as a bow. Barton rummages through another compartment in the bag, comes up with a couple of strings, and selects one. He stands, somehow twisting the bow between his legs as he does, and by the time he’s fully upright he has the string attached. He tests it absently with one hand and then holds it out to her.

Darcy shakes her head. “Wait. What did you just do?” He doesn’t seem to understand what she means. “Show me how to do that,” she clarifies. “I mean, I should do this right if I’m gonna do it.”

Barton gives her a curious look. Then he unstrings the bow with another quick step and movement, unhooks the string from the bottom of the bow and holds them both out to her.

Darcy tries to imitate what she saw, and it’s easy enough to loop one end of the string over the bottom part of the bow, where there’s a notch to hold it. But she can’t figure out what he did to bend the bow so he could attach the string to the other end. She hooks the bottom of the bow behind her ankle, but now she can’t figure how to get the leverage to bend it.

Barton moves behind her. “No. Like this.” He takes the bow in one hand and shifts it so the curve of the lower part is facing her leg, pressed against her shin. “Step over. Then you can—” He breaks off to catch her by the waist, because between trying to hold onto the string and follow his directions she’s tripping over her own feet. “Easy. One step at a time,” he says reassuringly.

Somehow, the second attempt works, though this time he keeps his hand on her waist and on the end of the bow until she’s steady, and then guides her placement of the string. She manages to step out of the now-strung bow without landing on her butt.

Darcy turns around, but as soon as she’d gotten the string in place Barton moved away, heading back to his bag. She sees that the other agents are mostly through with their roundup of the equipment, and also that one of the targets has been moved a whole lot closer to where they are. Barton seems to be giving them some other instructions, so she takes a minute to look over the bow.

It’s not all one piece, which is what she’d always thought bows were like. There’s a center part with what is obviously a grip, which is wrapped in well-worn tape, and two other pieces extending from it forming the ends. She runs a finger up and down the string, then tests how taut it is by plucking at it. Of course, she has no idea how taut it’s supposed to be, but it has resistance and vibrates satisfyingly when she lets it go.

“Feel about right?” Barton is standing there holding some arrows; they don’t look the same as the ones he was using, which are cleared away now. Those were sleek and high-tech and black, mostly; these look like they’re made of wood or something designed to look like it, and they have colors or markings on them.

Darcy shrugs. “I guess.”

Barton selects an arrow and examines the non-pointy end of it. “We’ll see, then.” He launches into a quick explanation of terms; the arrow has a shaft and a nock, and the feather-shaped things are fletchings. The ends of the bow are its limbs, this kind of bow is a recurve bow which means the way the ends of the bow curve back, this is the grip and the arrow rest.

He steps back when he’s done with the rundown. “Okay. That’s enough for a start.”

More than enough, as far as Darcy is concerned. “Now what?”

He grins and holds out the arrow, which Darcy almost forgets to take. Her mind is still reeling with new information and she automatically grins back before coming back to earth and reaching for the arrow. Awkwardly, she tries to fit the arrow onto the string.

Then Barton is behind her again, and his arms come around her as he guides her hands into position. “Bow hand here, feel it right here, your thumb and index finger make the hold. Arrow always points toward the ground until you’re ready to aim. Now, string hand, there’s more than one grip but let’s start with two fingers below the nock, one above. More control that way. But don’t touch the arrow.”

Darcy does _not_ feel like she has any control over what’s going on; so far, he’s sort of guiding her like a puppet. She doesn’t mind, though. At least the arrow is in the right place now. She looks down at her hands, trying to memorize how it feels. She glances down toward the target and automatically moves so she’s standing side-on to it, bumping back against her new instructor in the process.

He shifts with her. “Good.” One of his feet nudges one of hers a little further forward. “Just stand so you’re comfortable. Take a little pull on the string, just enough so you can feel pressure on your fingers.” His hands close over her wrists and then he moves her left hand out straight, simultaneously raising her right arm up and to the side. The bow comes into line with her face and beyond it she can see the target. But Barton doesn’t let go; instead, he pushes her arms back down and then guides them back up again. And again. “Feel that?”

Darcy shivers a little; he said that right into her ear just as he was tightening his grip on her wrists again. “I think so.”

His hands fall away from her and he steps back. “Show me. That’s pre-draw, you’re not going to let the arrow go yet, okay?”

She does it again, trying to make it feel the same as when he did it with her, and Barton doesn’t seem entirely displeased. “Not bad. Right elbow up a little more, you’re gonna need to use your back muscles when we go to full draw. Don’t move the bow out, move the string back.” She does it a few more times, and remembers to point the arrow down when her arms start to get tired. “Again?”

Barton jerks a thumb at the target. “Now you shoot.” He walks around and puts one hand over hers on the bow. “This time, you’re going to pull the string back more once you’re in position. Your hand comes all the way back to here.” The fingers of his other hand brush against her jaw. “That’s your anchor. Don’t think about it too much, just find where it’s natural. Just look at the target. Once you’re at full draw, just let your fingers slip off the string. Bow does the rest.” He steps back, letting go of her hand. “Ready?”

“Ready.” As she’ll ever be, Darcy guesses, and looks down at the target, which _still_ seems kind of far away. She takes a deep breath, adjusts her grip, draws her right arm up and back and further and lets go…

And the arrow goes sailing about twenty feet over the target, and also about twenty feet wide. Darcy winces. “I think I lost your arrow.”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s why you’re using the cheap ones.” He holds out another, but doesn’t let go of it when her fingers close on it. “Don’t move your string hand once you release,” he advises. “It’s all part of the same shot.”

“Okay.” He lets her have the arrow then, and she manages to get it nocked without dropping it. He doesn’t tell her when to shoot again, just stands and watches while she tries to get herself adjusted. This time the arrow doesn’t even reach the target’s distance; it barely gets ten feet away before scudding into the ground. Darcy glowers at it and holds her hand out for another arrow. “What’d I do that time?”

“Relax,” Barton says, and he’s right behind her again. “Tightened up too much on your grip on the bow, and then you let it go when you released. Don’t worry about the bow, just the shot.” He guides her through the draw one more time, but this time his hands are only lightly on hers; he’s letting her do the work. “Now look at the target,” he says. “See it? Should be right along the same line of sight with the arrow.”

“Oh, I see it,” she counters. He laughs, and nudges her bow hand the least bit in another direction. 

“Okay,” he says quietly. “You’ve got the shot lined up. Full draw and release.” He’s not touching her any more, although he hasn’t moved away and his voice is right there in her ear. “When you’re ready.”

Darcy takes a slow breath in, then out, and brings her hand back to her chin. _Look at the target. Just the target._ She lets her fingers slip from the string.

A second later the arrow hits the target. Not the center; it’s way up at one corner. Darcy couldn’t care less. She lets out a yelp and jumps up and down. “I did it!”

“You sure did.” Laughing, Darcy turns and almost smacks him in the face with the bow; he hasn’t moved back. He catches it, though, and doesn’t reprimand her for being careless. “Congratulations.”

Darcy feels a little off kilter, but she catches herself before she does anything too stupid. “Can I do it again?”

Barton rolls his eyes and steps back, offering her another arrow. “I’ll get some more,” he tells her before walking back towards the equipment bag.

Without the retriever squad, she does seem to go through a lot of arrows. She hits the target just often enough to tease, and sometimes even when she does the arrow doesn’t stick. Barton doesn’t touch her again, just offers suggestions and corrections from a distance.

Finally, after one last arrow lands in the outer ring of the target, Darcy looks down and shakes out her right hand. Barton comes over and takes her hand, turning it over to look at her fingertips, which are a little red. “Ow,” she says ruefully. She can feel the calluses on his fingers as they run over hers.

“That’s enough for today.” He reaches for the bow, but Darcy shakes her head.

“Let me.” She manages to figure out unstringing the bow herself, the reverse of what she did before; he follows her as she brings the unstrung bow back to his bag and kneels down to tucks it into its place. She rolls up the string as best she can before handing it to him to put away. “Thanks,” she offers. “Um, Agent—”

“Specialist.” He rewinds the bowstring rapidly, and gives her a quick half-smile. “But you can just call me Clint, okay?”

“Okay.” She gets back to her feet and dusts off her knees. “So I can try again sometime?” Darcy hopes she doesn’t sound too much like a puppy hoping to be taken for a walk, but this was the most fun she’s had since, well, since way too long.

“Sure.” He looks dead serious when he adds, “As long as you can find some of those arrows. I might run out.”

It takes her a second to realize he’s messing with her. Then she punches him on the arm. “I was _going_ to,” she says with dignity. Barton, or Clint now, she guesses, grins at her again.

“C’mon. I’ll help.” And he does, which turns out to be a good thing because he apparently also noticed where all the ones she shot wildly went. She also thinks she realizes the utility of having brightly-colored ammunition; at least the stray arrows stand out against the desert sand.

He waves her back eventually, once they’ve found the bulk of them, and she watches while he discards a couple that are clearly broken and stows the rest in his bag, which he zips closed and slings over one shoulder. Then he holds out a hand. “Pleasure shooting with you, Miss Lewis.”

She takes his hand, mimicking his mock formality. “You too.” They both start back toward town, and Darcy wonders for a fleeting moment whether those two guys on the roof are still there. If they are, they’d have been pretty bored watching her display after the earlier pyrotechnics. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that, anyway?” she asks curiously. Archery just seems so low-tech, compared to the rest of the toys these guys use.

Clint shifts the bag on his shoulder. “When I was a kid,” he says, “I ran away and joined the circus.”

Darcy is about to punch him again when she realizes that he maybe isn’t kidding with her this time. He doesn’t say anything else before he veers off towards wherever he stashes his gear between sessions, and she just continues on back toward the car dealership.

She hopes she didn’t just screw everything up. For the rest of the day, she finds herself unconsciously running her thumb over her first three fingers, remembering the feel of the bowstring and the release.

She doesn’t have calluses, but she can feel where they would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to all those who are giving this a whirl! I love hearing from you!


	4. The Prisoner's Dilemma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _A symmetric game is one in which the payoff for a particular strategy depends only on the other strategies employed, not on who is using them. In other words, if the identities of the players can be changed without changing the outcome of a particular strategy, the game is symmetric._
> 
> _The most famous symmetric game is known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is the classic example of why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it would seem to an outside observer that it would be to their benefit to do so._

There still isn’t much for Darcy to do, and now it feels like there’s even less.

She tells Jane about her morning as an extra in _Men In Tights_ , and Jane listens politely. When Darcy’s finished explaining how much fun it was and how much she kind of wants to do it again, she says, “Do you think using Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates would eliminate the issue with the physical singularity, or is it a trivial correction?” Which is not at all helpful, and Darcy just stares at her for a few minutes wondering if she’s looking more like Erik than she wants to, and then Jane gets _that_ look in her eyes again and goes off toward the back of the workshop. So that’s about all there is to that conversation.

She isn’t allowed to call her old college girlfriends and Erik is not the type for gossip, so that’s that. Darcy putters around the office, puts some files back in order, and in the process finds some old data Jane’s been looking for and that she would have known where it was if not for the whole “reorganization” of her stuff that took place while they were in Norway. One more point against the government bureaucrat thugs, but Jane is really excited about this particular batch of papers, so Darcy can at least feel like she did something useful today.

On the down side, the rediscovery has Jane and Erik even more off in their own little world, and while Darcy sometimes likes to sit in the room while they’re tossing ideas around and just catch what she can, the two of them are so deep into astrophysics equation territory that it’s obvious she’ll never be able to keep up. So she awards herself a decompression day and makes herself scarce.

She goes to the library and gets some good work in on what might eventually be her thesis, if she’s ever able to actually get out of here and go back to school. There’s a new book in for her, but she really gets stuck one chapter in. When she gets tired of trying to make sense of the same pages she’s read eight times, she just puts it away and goes on to something else, but the problem keeps blipping at the back of her mind and she can’t seem to move on. As annoying as her professors could be, she really misses being able to go to them for help. 

The rest of the library is pretty lame, but she digs around in the stacks until she finds a couple of old favorite novels and leaves everything else behind. She’s finally gotten the grocery store to stock black licorice Twizzlers, so she picks up a couple of packs and spends the rest of the afternoon reading and dozing on her bed. Jane and Erik don’t come back to the house, and when she finally wakes up, bleary-eyed, and wanders down to the diner, they aren’t there either.

Darcy thinks about sitting in a booth by herself with a secret agent/waiter to serve her, and gets takeout instead.

She gets most of the way through _Foundation_ before she falls asleep, and only wakes up when she hears the front door slamming shut. She showers and walks over to the workshop, but they’re gone and so is the Jeep, and Darcy really doesn’t feel like asking anyone where they went.

She takes the morning to sunbathe on the roof, and after she’s through courting skin cancer she figures she’ll have to get used to eating alone eventually, so she pulls on a tank top and heads for the diner. She brings her book, though. If she takes a booth at the back, facing away from the door, she can just read and pretend she’s not the only one in town with no job to do and no one who wants to talk to her.

The place clears out after the usual lunch rush, but she stays, eventually pulling her notebook out and starting to fiddle with some of the equations again. She’s drinking way too much coffee; there’s not much for the so-called waiter to do except keep refilling her cup, either, and she actually does kind of feel bad for him. This probably isn’t what he signed up for, either.

Still, the fifth time she senses someone at her elbow she automatically puts out a hand to block the offer of a refill; she’d like to have half a chance of getting to sleep tonight. It takes her a second to realize that the person standing there isn’t holding a pot of coffee.

“Hey,” she says belatedly.

Clint glances at the work spread out in front of her. “You busy?”

Darcy closes the notebook. “Not really.” Clint nods and slides into the seat across from her. He doesn’t say anything until the “waiter” has come by and gotten him a cup of coffee of his own. Then he nods at the notebook under her elbow.

“Something for Dr. Foster?”

Darcy shakes her head and takes a sip of cold coffee. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just wondering if it has anything to do with where she and Dr. Selvig took off to this morning.”

Unreasonably, maybe, that pisses Darcy off. “You can ask them when they get back,” she snaps. “I’m not your informant.”

Clint looks a little startled. “That’s not—look, I’m just making conversation. You don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”

“I can’t tell you where they went, because I don’t know. No one tells _me_ anything. Why should they?” Darcy grabs her notebook, stuffs it into her bag and starts to scoop up her papers and her library book. She’s stopped from getting up from the table when Clint reaches out and puts a hand on her arm.

“First, I meant you don’t have to tell me what you’re working on.” Darcy is really, seriously starting to hate that tone of his, and she shakes off his hand, but she doesn’t get up. “Second, they went to Santa Fe. Asked for a car and left early this morning. Something about talking to a colleague at the university.”

Darcy takes a deep breath. Then she settles back into her seat and looks straight at Clint. “I am getting sick and tired of apologizing to you. Just so you know.”

“You don’t have to.” She also kind of hates how unflappable he is, but she guesses it goes with the territory. “I get that you don’t want to be here, and if you can keep working on your own stuff, I think that’s great.” 

Darcy just stares at him for a minute or two. It’s the first time she’s really taken the time, and she looks until he narrows his eyes and glances down at himself. 

“What? I spilled coffee?”

“No.” Darcy flips open her messenger bag and pulls out the notebook; she opens it and shoves it across the table at him. He looks down at it and then back up at her. “It’s a series of equations related to the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Clint looks at the boxes and arrows, and she points. “The basic idea is, you have two players in the game, you call them prisoners. They have to make a choice of whether to cooperate and keep quiet, in which case they both go free because the police won’t have enough evidence to keep them, or they can defect. Rat on each other. If one rats and the other one doesn’t, he goes free and the other one serves a year.” She points to the last square. “If they both defect, each one gets three months. So what do they do?”

“Do they know each other?”

Darcy’s gaze shoots up from the book to his face. He’s not teasing her; it was a serious question. “Let’s say they don’t,” she answers.

“Then they both rat,” he says. “Only way it makes sense.”

Darcy nods. “Yeah. But what if you get to play the game more than once?” She taps the notebook. “That’s what this is. When you have the choice over and over again, how do you decide whether or not to cooperate?”

Clint shrugs. “Who says they ever do?”

“History. Sociology. Fact,” she tells him. “People _do_ cooperate, even when it seems like it isn’t in their own best interest. They do it all the time.” She turns the notebook back towards herself. “This is how someone tried to explain why that is.” Darcy picks up a pen and traces a series of three boxes. “He won the Nobel Prize in Economics for these equations,” she adds. “I’m trying to figure out a variation.”

“People don’t always cooperate,” Clint points out.

“I know. But why? How do they decide?” She underlines an equation. “If you know enough about the variables, and you don’t place a limit on the iterations…” She sighs and scratches something out. “I don’t understand it all yet,” she admits. She taps the pen against the notebook page, flips a page and then remembers she’s not alone in the booth any more.

She looks up to find Clint looking down, but not at the notebook. When she started explaining her equations she’d leaned forward over the table, and she’s still just wearing the tank over her bikini top.

Darcy sits back hastily and tugs her tank back into place. “So. That’s what I’m working on,” she offers.

“Pretty impressive,” he returns. Darcy isn’t quite sure what he’s talking about. 

“Thanks.” She pulls the notebook back across the table and closes it, smoothing her hand over the cover. “What’re you up to?”

“Not much.” Clint doesn’t quite meet her eyes when he adds, “Wondering if you really wanted to try some more target practice.”

Darcy can’t keep the grin off her face. “Seriously?” 

It’s too bad that Clint doesn’t smile more often, because he looks like a different person when he does. “Yeah.” He finishes his coffee with a gulp while she gathers up her papers and stows them in her bag, then stands and waits for her to maneuver herself and the bag out of the booth before following her toward the door. He reaches forward to open the door for her and Darcy feels his hand at the small of her back, just brushing skin at the hem of her shirt.

Two steps outside the diner, Clint stops short and his hand falls away. Darcy turns to see the librarian agent guy standing there. He’s one of the few who haven’t abandoned the coat and tie in favor of khakis and polo shirts, and right now he looks really incongruous standing there in the nearly-empty street. He smiles pleasantly enough. “Miss Lewis. Specialist Barton,” he greets them. But when Clint replies “Agent Abbott,” in an absolutely colorless monotone, Darcy has to force herself not to turn around.

Instead, and she doesn’t quite know why, she just keeps walking, pausing a few steps away to root around for something in her bag. That’s how she hears Abbott say, still in a casual, pleasant way, “I’ll see you at two o’clock, then?” and Clint, after an almost imperceptible pause, answer him.

“Yes, sir.”

Darcy starts walking again, sticking the buds of her headphones in her ears as she goes, although she doesn’t turn the iPod on. She heads around the corner as if she’s going back to her quarters, and she doesn’t really realize she’s holding her breath until she feels Clint’s hand at her elbow and lets it out in a huff as she turns. He looks at her like he’s waiting for something until she realizes and pulls the headphones out of her ears. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he returns. Darcy kind of expected him to be angry, for some reason, but he doesn’t seem to be. “Where’re you going?”

“Oh—I figured—” She glances down at her wrist, but she took off her watch to sunbathe. Still, it can’t be much short of two o’clock now.

“Why don’t you change out of the swimsuit and meet me where we were before?” Clint suggests.

“What about…” Darcy jerks her head backward.

One corner of Clint’s mouth twitches a little. “Fuck him. Let him wait.”

Darcy dumps her bag and hastily changes into real clothes back at her room, and when she arrives at the outskirts of the town Clint is there, with a target already set up and a couple of bags of equipment. She walks toward him, feeling a little awkward, and stops in front of him. She gestures at her outfit. “Better?” She picked a t-shirt with long sleeves, because last time she noticed a bruise along the inside of her arm.

“Yeah. Not that I didn’t appreciate the other thing.” Clint pulls something out of his back pocket and reaches for her left arm before she can really process what he just said. He holds it against her wrist. “Yeah, that should work.”

“What is that?”

“Arm guard,” he explains, so apparently he noticed the bruise too. “Here. String up and I’ll show you how it fits on.”

Darcy manages to get the string he hands her onto the bow the way Clint showed her before, and without falling over this time. She looks over to make sure she’s done it right, and he’s right there. He takes the bow from her and looks it over, then sets its end down and tucks it into the crook of her right elbow. Then he takes her other hand and starts strapping on the arm guard. Darcy feels like she’s a Barbie doll.

“You probably won’t need this once you get your technique down,” he tells her. “But there’s no reason to get more banged up than you have to.” Then he brings out something else and reaches for her right hand. It fits over her first three fingers and she immediately realizes it’s to keep the string from ripping up her hand like it did last time.

When he’s finished, he slides a small quiver of arrows off his shoulder and straps it around her waist. “Okay, go for it.”

And she does. It’s not quite as much fun as it was last time; Clint stalks around and keeps barking bits of advice at her right as she’s in the middle of aiming, or releasing, or something. Darcy keeps thinking of Erik and his Zen thing and eventually it just doesn’t work any more. She finally drops her bow to her side. “Do you not have _anything_ to do besides pick on me?” she demands.

Clint stops short and crosses his arms, and it is kind of forcibly borne in upon her that she’s just snapped at the best marksman she’s ever likely to see to stop teaching her to shoot. Then he nods. “Yeah, I do.”

Darcy lowers her bow to rest her arm and watches as he goes back to the equipment bag and opens up a new case. The bow he pulls out looks too short until he jerks his arm once, and it opens out into one that looks a lot like the one she’s holding, only more high-tech. She rotates her wrist—her _bow wrist_ , thank you very much—as she watches him pull out a high-tech quiver to match and sling it over his shoulder.

Clint comes back to stand about ten feet away from her, making some adjustments to his equipment, and then looks over at her. “What’re you waiting for?”

“For you to go ahead?” Darcy suggests. Because, _seriously?_

“Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. Just aim at your own target.” He comes to a set position and, even though she was watching him before, it’s the first time she realizes that his natural stance is right foot forward. And, looking at where he’s aiming, that there’s a few targets out there she didn’t even notice.

From there it’s just a blast. She’ll concentrate for a few shots, then watch him for a while as he does his own thing. She has to stop after a while to retrieve arrows, and he helpfully points them out from where he’s standing. It’s while she’s yelling back at him that she doesn’t care how good a shot he is, she doesn’t even want to see him move a hand to scratch his nose until she gets out of the field, that she sees the guy in the suit standing about fifty yards behind Clint.

Clint sees her expression, and turns his head.

Darcy thinks for a second that he’s going to fire an arrow at Abbott—Clint’s hand definitely tightens on his bow—but after a second he just turns his head back and goes still. Darcy doesn’t move either, and after a minute the agent turns and walks back toward the town.

Darcy isn’t sure what just happened, but she thinks she’s found enough stray arrows for the time being. She walks back to where Clint is standing. “You sure you have time for this right now? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Yeah, well. What’re they going to do? Fire me?” Clint doesn’t smile when he says it, though, and the whole thing kind of takes the fun out of the rest of the session. They keep at it for another round or so before Clint takes the bow and quiver from her and waves at her to finish up recollecting the arrows. She goes out and gets his, too, but that’s easy—they’re all in the more distant targets.

He’s gotten the rest of the equipment broken down and stowed before she gets back, and he takes the arrows from her with a nod of acknowledgement but nothing else. Darcy unstraps the arm guard and holds it and the finger tab out to him once he’s hefted the equipment bag up onto his shoulder. Clint looks at them and shakes his head.

“Nah. Keep ‘em.”

Darcy wants to ask again if he’s going to get in trouble for skipping whatever he was supposed to do with Abbott, but Clint doesn’t seem inclined to answer questions, so she just trails along behind him until their paths diverge, like before.

Jane is back in the lab when she gets back, all starry-eyed over some unpublished paper she got from her colleague in Santa Fe, and she wants to set up some equipment and calibrate instruments, so the rest of the day goes by pretty quickly. It’s late when she and Jane finally close things down and turn out the lights.

Outside on the street, Jane stops to greet one of the more junior agents, who apparently drove her to Santa Fe this morning. “It was so nice of you to do that—I hope you got some sleep this afternoon.”

“Yes, ma’am. Didn’t matter, as it turned out. Agent Abbott took me off night duty.”

Darcy keeps quiet all the way back to the house, and she has dinner with Jane and Erik and listens to the plans for the next day’s experiment, and goes to her room after they wash up. She sits down on her bed and listens until the water stops running in the bathrooms and the doors have shut, and waits a little longer after that. She turns off the lights in her room and waits another fifteen minutes before she opens her bedroom window and quietly climbs down the fire escape.

She knows that if she goes about a block out of her way she isn’t likely to run into any regular surveillance, and as far as she can tell no one notices her. She makes it back to the workshop with no active interference, anyway.

Once Darcy’s inside, she doesn’t really care if anyone notices her any more, so she turns on the kitchen light and hesitates a little between coffee and hot chocolate again. She decides on the latter and fills her thermos. She also grabs some cookies before she heads up to the roof again.

She doesn’t bring a flashlight this time. She sits down on one of the deck chairs, and sets out her mug and the thermos and the cookies, and after a few minutes she pours herself a cup. She’s glad of it, too; it’s chilly in the desert once the sun goes down. She crosses her legs under her and sips her drink until it’s gone, and then she waits a little more, and then she gets up and goes back downstairs, washes up her mug and retraces her steps back through the darkened town, back up the fire escape to her room.

The next morning, when she gets to work, the empty thermos is also in the dish rack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading. Also, thanks to twistedingenue for legitimizing this content with the winning term _archery porn_. Mrow.


	5. Simultaneous Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All right, kittens! Ready for more?
> 
> No archery. Lots of dialogue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Simultaneous games are those in which players’ moves are either literally simultaneous, or in which the later players have no knowledge of earlier actions, making their moves effectively simultaneous. In contrast, a sequential or dynamic game assumes some knowledge of the actions of earlier moves._

Even after the third time she finds her thermos cleaned and waiting for her, Darcy still isn’t absolutely sure what’s going on. To be more precise, she’s absolutely sure that Abbott is the jerk behind Clint replacing the junior agent on night duty. What she’s not sure about is why; if it’s just about skipping a meeting or if there’s some problem with them hanging out together.

Things are beginning to happen, though. Jane has an idea about some kind of energy matrix and Erik is working on something he says is absolutely not cold fusion but that the idiots in the press will describe it that way if it works. They put Darcy to work building a model of something they call a torus and she calls a doughnut. Jane is not amused when she prints out a picture of Homer Simpson to put on the worktable next to it, but Erik thinks it’s hilarious and somehow the project starts getting called Homer.

Darcy feels that’s likely to be her greatest contribution to the world of astrophysics.

The final coat of black paint isn’t drying fast enough for her to layer on the gridwork Jane wants marking the thing, so she comes back after dinner to see how it’s coming along. It’s ready, so she gets out the light-blue tape and starts laying out lines. It’s slow, painstaking work, and she starts getting a little woozy from the spray-on glue after an hour or so. 

She gets a bottle of water from the refrigerator and steps outside for a while, watching the streetlights wink on and a few stars appearing in the sky—it stays light pretty late at this time of year. Then she goes back to work.

It’s after midnight before she’s done, and she cleans up slowly, then makes up her usual thermos. She pulls on a sweatshirt before going up to the roof. It’s nice to lie back and watch more and more stars appear, and when she feels herself getting drowsy she doesn’t fight too hard to keep her eyes from drifting closed.

She really does have a moment of complete disorientation when she becomes aware of the hand on her shoulder shaking her gently, but that happens even when she’s in her own room sometimes these days. Darcy blinks a couple of times and reaches up to readjust her glasses so she can actually see out of both eyes.

“Hey,” she says, and clears her throat. “What time is it?”

“Two AM,” Clint answers. He’s sitting on the end of her deck chair, hands clasped between his knees. “Long day?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, because that’s an easy answer even if the reason she’s here is because she decided not going home until he showed his face was the only way she was not going to go nuts. “How about you?”

“You should get home.” He starts to stand up, and okay, so nothing about him. Darcy sits up and crosses her legs.

“Did I get you in trouble?” She’s pretty proud of the level of wobble in her voice, which is just enough to hint that she might get all emotional any second but not too much to not be believable. It’s also an ‘I’ statement. She’s pretty sure that’s the right direction to take this.

He sits back down, but he doesn’t say anything for a few seconds and he doesn’t deny that he’s _in_ trouble. “No,” he finally answers. “It’s not about you at all. Honest.”

Darcy doesn’t exactly believe that, but she’s not really in a position to argue. Instead she reaches for her thermos. “Coffee break?” she suggests.

She’s pretty sure he’s about to say no, but then he sighs and runs a hand over his short-cropped hair. “What the hell.” He watches as she pours the hot chocolate into her mug and the cup from the thermos, taking the latter from her when she’s done. He tilts the cup towards her in a casual toast. “Thanks, by the way.”

She doesn’t comment on the subtext of that, and sips her hot chocolate in silence for a while. It’s kind of nice being up here. And she’d figured, from the amount of sugar he’d dumped in his coffee at the diner, that hot chocolate would be a good bet.

“Can I ask you something? Without getting my head bit off?” Clint is watching her curiously.

Darcy sets down her mug. “Depends,” she says. “I’m not telling you what color underwear I have on.”

Clint raises his eyebrows. “Not quite where I was going, but…” He turns his own cup around in his hands. “What kind of work do you actually do here?”

This time, she doesn’t snap back an instant response. “Whatever Jane and Erik need done that doesn’t take a physics degree to do,” she answers honestly. “I didn’t exactly end up here on purpose.”

He nods. “But you were with her team back when they were here the first time.”

It’s a statement, not a question, and she tilts her head at him questioningly before she realizes, duh, he gets dossiers on everyone in town. “Yeah. But that was kind of an accident, anyway. I was stuck for science credits and I kind of wasn’t going to be able to do them at my home university.” Now it’s his turn to give her a questioning look, and she makes a face. “I got kicked out of biology lab,” she admits.

“Why?”

Darcy waves a hand. “Not important. Anyway, the easiest way to make it up was to do a summer internship. This was the only one I applied for that I got.”

“And you wound up with a little more than you bargained for.”

Darcy nods. “It’s not like it’s not cool being in on the research team, and Jane and Erik are great, it’s just…I want to go home, you know? I want to be able to go out on weekends.”

“Where’s your family?”

Darcy grabs for her mug, because she needs a second here. “New York. West Village. It’s really just me and my mom,” she tells him.

“How’d you wind up going to school way out here?”

“I didn’t,” Darcy says. “I never heard of Culver College before I applied for the job.” She turns the sarcasm back on, because that’s easy. “What, this isn’t in my file?”

“Probably above my clearance level,” Clint deadpans back at her, and she laughs and gives in.

“Emory. It’s in Atlanta. I thought I wanted to get out of New York.” Darcy snorts. “Stupid idea. You ever been to Atlanta?” Clint nods, a little warily. “People bitch about not being able to find their way around the Village, but try learning your way around a city where everything is named Peachtree.” She takes another sip; the cocoa is cold now, but she doesn’t want to admit she’s done yet. “Where’re you from?”

“Iowa.” He says it a little reluctantly, and Darcy is definitely solid on the idea that he doesn’t like talking about himself, so she doesn’t make any jokes about corn.

“That I would not have guessed,” she says carefully. “Is that all you really wanted to ask me?”

Clint gets quiet for longer than is comfortable, and when he finally sets down his cup she’s pretty sure the conversation is over. “I was wondering what the project status was,” he finally answers. “Seems like there’s been a lot of new work going on.”

Darcy honestly doesn’t understand why he wouldn’t know more than she would about that, but she isn’t about to start another fight, or let him get up and leave. “Jane is on to something,” she says. “Some new way of wrapping space around a wormhole. Or the other way around, I can never remember.”

“You think it’s going to work?”

Darcy shrugs. “Shouldn’t you ask Jane?”

“Dr. Foster...kinda talks above my clearance level too,” he says. “Or my brain level. I don’t know what to make of the updates.”

Darcy has a moment of wondering if she should be talking about this at all, what with him being on the Other Side and all. But it doesn’t matter, really, because she just doesn’t know. “She has a lot of reasons to make it work,” she says guardedly. 

Clint does stand up then, and Darcy figures the conversation is over, but he does a quick scan of the horizon and doesn’t move away. “She’s worked on this a long time,” he ventures.

Darcy, for one, is sick of dancing around the topic. “Right now I think she’s way more interested in why Muscles from Asgard didn’t talk to her during his US tour,” she says, and Clint does that freezing-in-place thing again. “You were there, right? Did he even ask about her?”

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. Darcy is getting the idea that maybe this is a really bad direction for the conversation to be going. “I…after the fight, it was…everything went down fast.”

“I wouldn’t know. So I’m sorry if I’m being insulting or something, but I didn’t get the memo.” She waits a beat, then points out, “It’s kinda hard to know what the deal is when all I know about what happened is apparently Manhattan got trashed and you guys got famous, and then he took off again like there was a preacher with a shotgun behind him.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Clint grits out between clenched teeth. “The guy we were fighting—he had to be contained.”

Darcy starts to ask if anyone hadn’t suggested that a phone call would hardly have been a serious drain on anyone’s schedule, and then she takes another breath and decides to shut up. 

After a minute Clint sighs and rests his hands on his hips. “Look, it was a bad scene. I really can’t tell you much about it, but I do know he was worried about Dr. Foster. I think…he’s not human, Darcy. I don’t think he thinks about things the same way we do.”

Darcy chews that over in her head. “He was pretty human when he first showed up,” she offers. “Except his appetite.”

She’s kind of ridiculously chuffed when Clint snorts out a definite laugh. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. And, like, he’d eat _whatever_. Just…” She waves a hand. “Keep it coming. And he was really sweet, after he got over the whole I-am-a-god-and-you-are-mere-mortals thing.”

“‘Sweet,’” Clint echoes. He shakes his head. “Not exactly the word I’d have used.”

“He was,” Darcy insists. “I mean, if you just saw him while he was being all God-of- Thunder and everything…but he was really nice when we were just hanging out.” So maybe Clint can’t talk about whatever super-secret-hero stuff went down in New York, but she isn’t restrained by any such limitations. “He liked music, and, and he got Erik really _epically_ drunk once. And he gave the most awesome hugs.” She pauses. “And he really liked Jane,” she adds, a little forlornly. “That’s why I don’t get him coming back and not. Whatever.”

Clint doesn’t try to argue with any of what she’s said. He doesn’t totally look like he’s buying it, but he nods. “So. You liked him.”

“Of course I liked him.” Darcy doesn’t really know why she’s arguing Thor’s case for him. “And I like Jane. So yeah.”

Clint’s mouth twists a little. “Well. Good thing I didn’t shoot the big son-of-a-bitch, then.” Darcy’s mouth drops open and he holds up a hand. “When he was here the first time, I mean.”

“Wait a goddamn minute. You were here? Then?” Darcy crosses her arms. “Discuss, please.”

“Hey. I didn’t know anything about you guys,” Clint protests. “I was here, yeah. Part of the team investigating the, uh, artifact.”

“Mjölnir,” Darcy says smoothly (take _that_ , Erik-I-am-a-Viking Selvig). “Continue. Shoot him why?”

“Nothing personal,” he answers. “Guy came after his hammer, charged in like an aggressor.”

“It was his hammer,” Darcy returns, but mostly just to mess with him. “I mean, you didn’t, right? No harm, no foul.”

“Yeah,” Clint agrees, but he seems preoccupied and doesn’t really acknowledge her bantering tone. 

Darcy decides to see if he’s really listening. “Anyway, he had a rough week. Jane totally pulled MVA action on him twice.” Clint just looks puzzled. “And then I tasered him,” she adds. She’ll bet anything she owns Clint doesn’t know about that. Because, like Thor is going to go around telling _that_ story. 

He definitely has not heard that one before. “What?” he says blankly.

“Taser,” Darcy repeats. “You know. Zap. Boom,” she elaborates, and sketches a body falling with one hand. Clint stares at her for a good twenty seconds. “What?”

“You serious?” 

Darcy nods.

He sits down again. “Out-fucking- _standing_.” He’s smiling again, and it is so totally not fair of him to look at her like that when he does.

Darcy shrugs and tries to act nonchalant. “I’m telling you. Girl’s best friend,” she tells him, and then sighs. “They took it away, though. At the airport on the way to Norway.” She brightens up. “Hey! You think they’d requisition one for me?”

“I think you’re dangerous enough now,” Clint says, and he leans forward, and for one heart-stopping second she thinks he might be about to kiss her. Not that she’s been thinking about it all that much or anything, but if he wanted to, she would be in favor of trying it. Just as an experiment.

“What were you working on down there?” 

Darcy blinks. “Oh…um, a model thingy. It’s called a torus. Art project, really.” She feels a little disoriented. “I don’t really know what the point of it is,” she admits. “I’m pretty much coloring by numbers.”

“But it has something to do with the bridge?” If there’s something he’s aiming at here, Darcy is missing the point.

“Yeah, but I’m not sure what. They’ve been talking about space-time and quantum physics. And vacuum solutions,” she adds helpfully. 

“Meaning what?”

“I have no freaking idea,” Darcy tells him, maybe a little more forcefully than necessary. “Seriously. I did two semesters of physics for idiots. This stuff is so far out of my league it’s like, in another universe. No pun intended.” 

“Okay,” Clint holds up a hand. “I get it.”

She looks at him curiously. “Jane can explain this stuff better than I can,” she says. “In fact, it’s hard to stop her once she gets going. Why don’t you ask her? Or Erik?”

Even in the limited light, she doesn’t miss the way his jaw tightens. “Too official,” is all he says. “Not really need-to-know for my job.”

Darcy nods, and squashes down that feeling of being pumped for information. Which she doesn’t have, anyway. “They call it kindergarten physics,” she ventures.

The way Clint’s forehead knits up when he’s confused makes Darcy want to keep him in a constant state of befuddlement. “Why?”

“Because it deals with sub-elementary particles,” Darcy answers, and mimes a rimshot. Clint rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that’s what passes for humor in the lab. Okay, so here’s the kindergarten explanation. There’s space-time, like, everywhere. And it has warps and folds and stuff in it. And sometimes, there are these areas where it gets squished up and pinched off. And between the squished-up area and the pinched-off area, that’s a wormhole.” She gets a look at his expression. “I didn’t say I _understood_ it,” she says defensively. “I just take all the weird sci-fi talk and oversimplify it.”

“And this is going to lead to interdimensional travel?”

“If Jane does the math right. And doesn’t blow anything up. Again,” Darcy amends. “I know, seems freaky.”

“It just seems like magic tricks,” Clint argues.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Darcy quotes, then shakes her head when he gives her a querying look. “Not mine. Arthur C. Clarke, I think.” She leans forward a little. “Anyway, the main reason I think she’ll figure it out is, well, obviously it can be done. Right? So it’s not a question of being impossible any more. It’s just a question of figuring out why it’s _not_ impossible.”

Clint is silent again for a while, and then he glances back up toward the darkened neon sign. “You should go,” he says. “Got to get back to work.” He stands, and Darcy reluctantly follows suit. She picks up the Thermos and He walks her as far as the trap door. “Thanks again,” he says.

“For what?” Darcy stops just short of the ladder. She doesn’t really want to go back to her room, and she isn’t really sure what exactly got said tonight, so she kind of wants some clarification. Or something.

He looks tired, she realizes, dark circles under his eyes, or maybe that’s just the way the light is filtering up from below. But he smiles just a little, and drops his gaze for a second as though he’s unsure of what to say. It’s another one of those will-he or won’t-he moments, but in the end he just reaches up and brushes his fingers over her cheek. “Good night, Darcy,” he says, and then steps back into the shadows.

Darcy really wants to call him back, but she has no idea what she’d say. And then he’s gone, so she just climbs back down the ladder and washes up the dishes. 

It’s not like she’s going anywhere.


	6. Perfect Information

_A game in which each player must know every move made is said to have perfect information. Again, chess is an example of a game of perfect information. This should not be confused with a game of complete information, although the concepts are similar. In a game of complete information, although each potential strategy with its attendant payoff must be known, what specific choices have been made may not be._

The lab is already buzzing with activity by the time Darcy makes another slightly belated appearance in the morning. There are about thirty new papers tacked up on the wall Jane is using as some sort of filing system, and the doughnut has been suspended on wires over the table and a bunch of strings attached to it. Darcy pours coffee into the largest mug she can find as she watches Jane directing three different agents on how to wind these multicolored strings around and attach them at different points to the ceiling or floor.

It all looks like some kind of hyperscience Maypole dance, she decides, and looks on with some amusement as one of the agents who’s up on a ladder almost gets strangled when Jane reverses direction with a blue strand. She takes pity on them after she finishes her coffee and takes over directing the actual placement of the strands. She’s used to translating Jane’s instructions into actual human language, and manages to figure out what she wants done before anyone loses their life.

When they’re finished, it looks like the original doughnut is trying to grow into both the ceiling and floor in expanding directions. Jane is darting around like a hummingbird on speed making adjustments to the strings and then racing over to the papers to tweak her equations. Darcy decides it’s time for a nutritional interruption and heads out to the diner to see if she can pick up something for a midmorning snack.

She’s surprised, as she’s waiting for some actual doughnuts to be boxed up for her to take back (hey, it may be literal, but they ship in Krispy Kremes and those are not to be missed even without an excuse), when she sees Clint standing outside on the street with two other agents. All of them are in black uniforms, which she hasn’t seen in a while.

“Give me six more,” Darcy demands impulsively, and when she leaves the diner she veers toward the three of them and opens the box. “Guys—want one?”

The two other agents look at Clint, who’s doing something with a handheld computer. His glance at her is perfunctory. “No thanks. You guys go ahead, though,” he adds, and goes back to whatever he was doing.

A little deflated, Darcy lets the other agents dig into the treats and then takes the slightly depleted box across to the lab.

Erik, looking unshaven but energized, meets her in the kitchen. “Let me help you with that,” he offers, and another two doughnuts are gone before the box hits the counter.

“Whoa, boss-man.” Darcy grabs the box. “You better not have the last maple glazed in your hot little Scandinavian hand.”

Erik eats two-thirds of his first doughnut in one bite and closes his eyes in ecstasy. “Chocolate,” he mumbles through a mouthful. “You are a goddess.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Darcy tells him, and finds a maple one for herself. There’s a fresh pot of coffee—but of course there is—so she pours some for both of them. “Can you explain, in words understandable to sixth graders, what is going on in here?”

Erik swallows. “Sixth graders?”

Darcy unwinds her scarf and sits at the kitchen table. “Okay, maybe eighth graders.”

Erik comes over and sits down across from her. He gives her a searching look. “You know, you should stop selling yourself short,” he says, with that touch of an accent that sometimes appears in spite of his perfect English. But he’s absolutely serious, and Darcy does not do serious.

“Fine. Tenth,” she ripostes, but Erik shakes his head.

“Darcy,” he says reprovingly. “I’ve seen your own work. It’s over _my_ head. You’re a valuable member of the team here.” And that just sets something off.

“First, if you wanted to be an expert in game theory, you’d be ahead of me in a week. Second, sure, I’m very valuable at making coffee and driving the Jeep. Oh, wait, I forgot, I don’t have to do any of that any more because government jerks do it for you. And third—”

“Third, stay out of your business?” Erik says mildly, and Darcy brings herself up short and wishes like hell for the seventeenth time this week that she would finally learn to think before she shoots off at the mouth. “I will if that’s what you want. But you have real talents, Darcy, and you should know that.”

“Sorry,” she mutters, wincing internally at the repetition. “I just—sorry.”

Erik sips some coffee. “You’re good with people,” he observes. “Which I imagine is what your theoretical work really taps into.”

This is why Darcy doesn’t do serious. It’s _way too embarrassing_. And revealing. “Thanks.” And since they’re completely over-sharing here, she takes a breath and a huge plunge. “Can I ask you something?” Erik just nods, well away with his second doughnut. “What happened to you while we were in Norway?”

Erik doesn’t even seem surprised by the question. He finishes his mouthful. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he says, and Darcy looks down. She might have known it wouldn’t be that easy. “But as a scientist, I’m in favor of the free exchange of information.” He picks up his coffee and stands up. “Shall we?” He indicates the roof with his eyes.

Darcy picks up her own coffee and follows him.

Once they’re settled on the roof, with no agents in sight for a change, Erik gazes off toward the horizon for a few seconds before he speaks again. “It’s hard to know where to start,” he says eventually. “I was asked to work on a piece of technology that was discovered near the site of a World War II plane wreck. It was not…from here,” he adds carefully. “As it turned out, someone came after it.” He pauses again, and Darcy practices her new habit of not jumping in with an unwarranted conclusion. “He wasn’t…you remember that book I found in the library that summer?” Darcy nods. “His name was Loki.”

“The god of mischief?” She doesn’t know why she sounds disbelieving. Or even surprised, all things considered.

Erik nods soberly. “Thor’s brother.”

Once, when she was ten, Darcy climbed to the top of the water tower on her apartment building on a dare from her best friend. The memory of the feeling in her stomach when she reached the top of the ladder and looked down twelve stories onto Greenwich Avenue comes back to her vividly in this moment. “I didn’t know that.”

“Not many people do.” Erik leans forward and rests his arms on his knees. “Even fewer know this. I was involved with what Loki did. I worked for him, in fact.” His eyes, which she has always thought are the kindest ones she’s ever seen, bore into hers. “I didn’t mean to or want to, but he was able to gain control of us. Make us think his goals were ours, and wise, and right. We believed in his lies, and so much destruction followed.”

“You didn’t know he was…” Darcy doesn’t quite know how to end that sentence.

“We didn’t know anything at all,” Erik answers. “We were…I guess you could call it brainwashed.”

Something about what he’s saying finally sinks in. “You keep saying ‘we,’” she points out. The knot in her stomach is tightening.

“Agent Barton and myself were both affected, along with some others, later on.” Darcy manages to take that in without vomiting, which is doing pretty well as far as she’s concerned, but something must show on her face.

“He didn’t tell you that.” Erik’s eyes are still on her, weary and sympathetic and intelligent, and she just can’t meet them. After a moment he looks away. “Well. I imagine it’s different for him, what he’s able to say. He’s a soldier, part of S.H.I.E.L.D. Don’t be too hard on him.”

At some point, Darcy is going to have to deal with the fact that Erik knows she’s been hanging out with Clint, but that time is not now. “But he’s an Avenger,” she says numbly, realizing even as the words tumble out that she still knows practically nothing about what that means. “He fought…that guy. Didn’t he?”

“Indeed he did.” Erik smiles, just a little. “As did I. Eventually. But people died because of what we both did. It hasn’t been easy to live with that.”

Pieces are falling into place, but the picture they’re making is so ugly that Darcy just doesn’t know what to do with any of it. She’s starting to understand the Zen-guru thing Erik has going on, though. And if she ever again acts bitchy about dumb shit, she is so going to be pissed at herself.

She gets up from her chair and moves to sit next to Erik on his, bumping his shoulder with her own. “Hey. Good guys won, right?” Erik nods and she leans in a little, rests her head on his shoulder and slips her arm through his in something that’s not quite a hug but will have to do for now. “Sorry that happened,” she offers, knowing how completely inadequate that is, but Erik smiles and pats her hand.

“You see? Good with people.” They sit quietly together for a while. “So. I understand you’ve been learning to work with more traditional weaponry than you used on our large friend.” He laughs when Darcy makes a face. “It’s not a large community here,” he points out. “Of course people have noticed.”

Darcy’s instinct is to downplay, but she doesn’t think it will work, so she doesn’t bother. “Yeah,” she agrees. And because those pieces that fell are still rattling around in her head, or whatever mixed metaphor she really means, she asks, “Is that why he’s here? I mean, is he not an Avenger any more because of all that?”

Erik’s brow knits. “Oh, I wouldn’t think so. This is a fairly high-profile assignment; they consider Jane’s and my work to be a priority. I don’t entirely understand the dynamic, but from what I did hear they aren’t intended to be a permanent group. They work on an as-needed basis, I guess you could say.” He looks thoughtful. “I don’t know what all of them do when they’re not…”

“Avenging?” Darcy offers helpfully.

“Yes.” Erik smiles again. “They do other things.”

And that’s about all there is to say about that, it seems. They sit and finish their coffee, and eventually some agents show up for standing-around-watching-the-empty-town duty and they go back down to the lab where Darcy spends the rest of a busy morning trying to get Jane to stop calculating long enough to eat something other than a Powerbar.

Jane keeps trying to call the torus Clifford, but no big red dog is going to outclass Homer. 

Darcy cuts loose after practically spoon-feeding Jane her lunch and decides to clear her head at the library. She nods at Agent Dweeb as she heads for her table in the corner. She’s still determined to get that first chapter down on the mat, and it’s been blipping at the back of her head the whole day, but she still can’t get through the first four paragraphs without her brain trying to crawl out her ear.

She goes to the computer after a while, figuring even if she can’t talk to her old professors directly, maybe she can find something online that’ll help her out. She does find a few helpful hints, but of course when she finds one site run by a professor at MIT that might actually be some use to her, it’s blocked.

“God _damn_ it,” Darcy swears only half under her breath, and then looks up to see Agent Abbott—she is _not_ going to keep thinking Dweeb in her head because she is mature and beyond all that—looking vaguely surprised in front of her monitor.

“I just wanted to let you know I’d be leaving the library for a short time. For lunch,” Abbott stutters, and Darcy shoves the monitor around so he can see it.

“Well, before you bug out, would you mind telling the computer that just because Dr. Osborne’s site mentions the word ‘conflict’ or something, doesn’t mean it’s dangerous?” She doesn’t blink and she sure as hell doesn’t mention that she saw him at the diner two hours ago when she picked up the soup and sandwiches for the lab.

This has come up already, although she’s never been caught swearing at the Internet before, because the security parameters really are so restrictive as to be ridiculous. Abbott hesitates, Darcy glowers at him and he loses. She stands up as he comes around the desk to tap in the code that knocks out the parental controls on the ‘Net.

“Thanks,” Darcy says, making sure she doesn’t sound too conciliatory, and barely waits for him to get out of her chair before she’s scrolling through the website he’s freed up. Abbott stand there behind her for a good two minutes before he apparently decides he really does have somewhere else more important to be.

Darcy waits for him to get entirely out the door before she pulls out a flashdrive and redirects her open window to YouTube.

If she can't have perfect information, she can at least have more of it.


End file.
